“Is there something in the air, you think? I mean, I get it. It’s all relaxing and shit. But I suddenly feel so calm. Like nothing else matters.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me,” I say. “ALCOR slips drugs into my showers back on Harem any time he thinks I’m too stressed.”
“I think I’m gonna like your ALCOR. He seems to love you. Or, at the very least, he wants to take care of you.”
“Well,” I say. “He’s not the same these days. Long story. So he actually hasn’t done that in a while. But yeah. It was nice. It wasn’t like that in the beginning, either. He wasn’t used to being around people, especially young people who did stupid things like fall off balconies and lift bots. But it’s been more than twenty years now, so before that shit show out at Bull Station happened, he was pretty good at taking care of us.”
This makes me smile.
“What do you mean?” Delphi asks. “What happened after Bull Station?”
“Oh, I figured everyone knew by now. All those people died on Harem when the baby ALCOR took over.”
“What?”
“He… fuck. He—ALCOR—he blew himself up to take out that Cygnian warship. That was the real him, not a copy. So… yeah. The baby ALCOR was left behind to take care of the station but it was not equipped to deal, so lots of shit went off the rails.”
“ALCOR’s dead?”
“Kinda. I mean, there’s old copies of him in the security beacons, but they’ve been autonomous for so long now, they’re their own personalities. And the baby ALCOR is technically ALCOR, but then again, not really. Nothing like him at all, actually. So yeah. The AI who took care of me and my brothers, he’s gone now.”
“How sad. He was like your father.”
“Yeah, I guess he was. I never really thought of it that way since I had a real father when I was a kid. But ALCOR was the one who made us who we are today.”
“I’m sad that I’ll never get to meet him.” Then she stiffens a little. “Not that I was ever going to meet him. I mean. I have no clue what I mean. I might be high.”
I chuckle at that. I might be high too. Because all I can think about is sliding my hands up inside her shirt and playing with her nipples.
But before I can do that we exit the woods and enter the meadow the ambassador mentioned and the steed changes gait and begins to lope.
This makes Delphi and I rock together in a new rhythm. She squeals and I hold her tight, her tits bouncing a lot more as we move forward. Her ass is lifting up out of the saddle and then bouncing down in a pattern that reminds me of fucking.
Hell, who am I kidding? Everything reminds me of fucking right now.
I want to tell myself to knock it off. To enjoy this date and there’s plenty of time later for sex. But my cocks—both of them are awake now—have other pressing ideas.
When we get to the center of the meadow, larger, leaf-eating herbivores scatter into the cover of the trees as we approach and the steed slows down. Delphi and I bounce jerkily until we fall back into a walk, and then finally stop.
I’m just about to give the steed another kick to keep going because I will be fucking Delphi in that cabin when we get there—when the sun disappears and the stars come out.
“Oooooooo,” Delphi says, leaning back into my chest so she can look up. The stars change to a view of some unrecognizable solar system orbiting a binary sun. Comets whiz by, then an asteroid starts hurtling towards us in such high definition, both Delphi and I bring our arms up in front of our faces in self-defense. “It’s a giant screen!” she says. “Look! There’s a black hole!”
It is. And hell yeah, that girl back at the stables was right. This is a breathtaking surprise. We start moving towards the black hole. Slowly, at first. Then faster, and faster until the stars blur and I feel unsteady on the back of the steed. Like I’m floating.
Both of us yell when we enter the vortex, squealing like kids. But when we come out the other side there’s a blue-brown planet surrounded by clouds. We hurl through space towards it, getting closer, and closer until we enter the atmosphere and then the scene is a large expanse of grassland prairie dotted with strange-looking animals around a watering hole.
Some look recognizable. Oddly, and funnily enough, a whole herd of creatures remind me of karkadanns, only their horn is on the bridge of their noses instead of their foreheads, and they have short, stubby gray bodies with thick folds of skin armor.
There’s even a bunch of steeds—almost like the one we’re riding, but much smaller and with black and white stripes. Another herd of long-limbed animals, with even longer necks, reach high up into tree tops as their slender, black tongues pull leaves into their mouths. And a group of beasts with golden manes stalking towards us are so clearly top-of-the-food-chain predators, I have a moment of panic and kick the steed to make him run.